Starting out in SEO

All your citations (an online reference to your business including your NAP) need to be consistent, so as you start building them (see below), make sure that firstly, your NAP is correct, and the same (so Google & Bing can see the connection). Use Fetch as Google to test whether Google can crawl and index important pages within your site. Just because long form content is meant to be educational and informative, doesn’t mean it has to be dry. Incorporating humor and writing in a conversational tone are strategies for making long form content more readable and interesting. Having a news section on your site is a really good idea. It gives you the opportunity to fit in lots of keywords and it means you are regularly updating your website (which the search engines look favourably on). Having a blog on your site is good for the same reasons; plus if you are focusing on specific keywords you can write a post around them. Guest posting as a tactic has a dual benefit. First, it helps you reach the target audience of blogs who have similar audiences as yours. Second, it helps you get backlinks to your site so you can drive up your search engine rankings.

Links coming from sites which have link networks

The greatest selling point of SEO is something that it shares with most of the broader world of inbound marketing: it allows for the possibility of cumulative growth. Make the content flow easily to keep people intrigued and reading. Imagine for a moment, a yacht. The on-page elements represent the sails and the ropes above water. Now imagine the technical elements of SEO are everything below the water line: the hull and the cabin. So you could have your sails blowing, and your knots tied correctly, but if there’s a hole in the bottom of your boat you’re not going to get very far. Integrate keywords, not only into the content itself, but also into the title, the meta description and even the canonical URL. For many businesses the goal is to get their business to position number 1 on Google, but did you know that there’s a new top spot on Google called position zero. You’ve probably noticed these results but maybe not understood them properly. Position zero is all about using featured snippets to give an informative answer to a user’s query. It’s not uncommon for the results that are further down the first page listings to be featured in position zero.

What do you understand by On page optimization?

The prospect of Google penalties strikes fear into the hearts of most webmasters -- or at least the ones who don’t fully understand them. In the early days of SEO, it was the quantity, not quality of links that mattered. “Link building” consisted of mass spamming and buying of links, online directory submissions, building bad links, mass commenting on sites and blogs and using automated link bait. Familiarize your content creators with basic SEO practices and ensure they work closely with the SEO team to create material that will rank as highly as possible from the moment of publication. Most SEO consults cover a local area. Canonicalizing URLs is a very important aspect of Search Engine Optimization but also of Social Media Marketing. Instead of focusing on what you do or what you sell or why you’re awesome, instead focus on why your customers should care.

Reduce “Code Bloat” on your Pages

We asked an SEO Specialist, Gaz Hall, for his thoughts on the matter: "One of the most common problems that I hear from people looking to learn more about SEO is that they don't know what information to trust." The most fundamental objective of any SEO project should be to drive the bottom line. For a business, this means delivering more revenue with favorable ROI. SEO is a long-term strategy, so it sometimes takes months before you start seeing results. Google and Bing have moved far beyond algorithms that positively reward a keyword appearing multiple times in the URL string. Don’t hurt your chances of earning a click (which CAN impact your rankings) by overdoing keyword matching/repetition in your URLs. I have seen my share of websites where the owner told me that conversion was low or that nobody filled out their contact form. But the owner had no idea how many people got to his/her website. No idea what the main landing pages or exit pages were.

Content is King (for now)

A backlink is basically someone else’s website linking to you. Obviously, pages with higher page rank that link back to you give more Google Juice. Analyzing content alone is not real SEO. Making a deliverable look pretty for a client is not SEO. If you don’t know where to submit a guest blog post or what forums would be good to participate on, research where your competitors are going to get links and follow suit. One of the most important elements to building an online marketing strategy around SEO is empathy for your audience. Once you grasp what your target market is looking for, you can more effectively reach and keep those users. SEO projects require forethought and planning to obtain the best results, and SEO needs to be considered during, and incorporated into, all stages of a website development or redevelopment project.

How do I build backlinks?

Optimizing your website will invariably lead to more organic traffic later on in the life of that website, so there’s no reason you shouldn’t do it. Look at any forums, blogs, message boards or other chat services you might be using. In many of these environments, it is acceptable for users to give contact information and even drop links to their websites, as long as they do it in a certain way. Link building is still an important part of your company’s SEO strategy. Instead of trying to get as many links as possible, proper link building now focuses on relationship building and by providing valuable information. Your website’s health will not only impact your SEO results but will also have a hand in how well you’re able to convert your traffic. Online search is a murky world for those looking to be found at the top of Google's Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).